{"id":6839,"date":"2016-03-26T12:47:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-26T12:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=6839"},"modified":"2016-03-26T21:41:02","modified_gmt":"2016-03-26T21:41:02","slug":"a-glimpse-back-to-our-beginnings-johann-heinrich-bisterfeld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=6839","title":{"rendered":"A glimpse back to our beginnings: Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the early stages\u00a0of the Cultures of Knowledge project, those precursory days in which\u00a0workshops, seminars, and conferences were scheduled, when hard-copy editions were still the primary concern, and when Early Modern Letters Online as we know it now was no more than a glimmer in a number of professorial\u00a0eyes, a handful of scholars were quick to spot the potential of the journey upon which we were\u00a0embarking. And, of these, Dr No\u00e9mi Viskolcz, the scholar behind EMLO’s latest catalogue to be published \u2014 that of the correspondence of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 was the first. As our project director, Professor Howard Hotson,\u00a0recalls, ‘It was in the very first month, at the very first workshop, which was held in Prague in January 2009, that No\u00e9mi asked if we’d\u00a0like to include her\u00a0metadata for the correspondences of\u00a0Permeier <\/a>and Bisterfeld’.<\/p>\n

Today we welcome the second of Dr Viskolcz’s catalogues into EMLO. Bisterfeld, described recently by Professor\u00a0Hotson as ‘truly\u00a0treasured by those who know him’, was based from the age of twenty-four in\u00a0Alba Iulia [Gyulafeh\u00e9rv\u00e1r<\/a>], then the capital of the Principality of Transylvania and the city to which he had travelled from Herborn in 1629 at the invitation of\u00a0G\u00e1bor Bethlen<\/a>, prince of Transylvania. Having completed\u00a0this arduous\u00a0journey (some one-and-a-half thousand kilometres) in the company of both Philipp Ludwig Piscator <\/a>and his own father-in-law and former teacher\u00a0Johann Heinrich Alsted<\/a>,\u00a0Bisterfeld remained in\u00a0Alba Iulia for the rest of his life. As a professor at the city’s new Academia, he continued to exchange letters, however, with a number of scholars and members of learned circles across\u00a0Western Europe. His correspondence provides an invaluable addition to EMLO, where it will be joined later this year\u00a0by catalogues for, amongst others, Alsted.<\/p>\n

We are delighted to announce simultaneously that it is possible now to search for catalogues within EMLO by contributor<\/a>, whether an individual scholar, a correspondence\u00a0project, a publisher, or a library. We hope this index\u00a0will provide a sense of the broad\u00a0range\u00a0and scholarly expertise of the growing body of contributors working now with EMLO, as well as a means of\u00a0checking quickly the origin of each catalogue’s\u00a0metadata. It seems fitting at this stage of our history\u00a0to reflect upon the origins of EMLO’s\u00a0burgeoning catalogues, and we would like to thank those\u00a0who, from the earliest days of Cultures of Knowledge, have followed the example of Dr Viskolcz with\u00a0contributions of metadata. Of course, with each calendar of correspondence published in the union catalogue,\u00a0our twenty-first century hopes\u00a0for the\u00a0early modern networks that stretched across the face of Europe and beyond become increasingly less of an aspirational dream\u00a0and more an achievable reality. Coincidentally, this week also sees publication of an article by Howard Hotson in the Intellectual History Review<\/a>. <\/em>Entitled ‘Highways of light to the invisible college: linking data on seventeenth-century intellectual diasporas’<\/a>, the article\u00a0contains a\u00a0discussion of Culture of Knowledge<\/a>, of EMLO<\/a>, and of the Reassembling the Republic of Letters<\/a> COST Action, as well as\u00a0the possibilities that lie ahead, all seen through the lens of the audacious pansophic enterprises of Comenius and Hartlib, who have provided one focus of attention for the scholarly dimension of the project since those first days in Prague. Who would not be excited about a virtual platform that, as Howard explains, could see ‘transnational and interdisciplinary scholarly communities capable of comprehending the communication revolution of the early modern period in ways virtually unimaginable during the age of print’? Happy Easter reading!<\/p>\n

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Detail from ‘Portrait of Monsignor Agucchi’, by Annibale Carracci. 1603\u201304. Oil on canvas, overall dimensions 60.3 by 46.3cm. (York Art Gallery, accession number 787; reproduced by kind permission of York Museums Trust [York Art Gallery] and used as the logo for the Cultures of Knowledge project).<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early stages\u00a0of the Cultures of Knowledge project, those precursory days in which\u00a0workshops, seminars, and conferences were scheduled, when hard-copy editions were still the primary concern, and when Early Modern Letters Online as we know it now was no more than a glimmer in a number of professorial\u00a0eyes, a handful of scholars were quick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}